MG duo Jason Plato and Sam Tordoff were both pleased to have put points on the board, despite being unable to match their rivals during a tough weekend at Thruxton.
Having struggled to replicate the pace of the Hondas throughout the weekend, Plato drove well to hold onto second place in race one before securing fifth in race two. In the reverse-grid race three, the 45-year-old had looked set to win his third race of the season, before a puncture put pay to his chances of retaining a championship lead that he had held since the opening race of the season.
Plato was nonetheless upbeat about his squad’s performance, saying: “We didn’t really get the car to handle quite as we would have liked over the course of the weekend and that hurt us a bit. But there are positives that we can take away from it, because we put new set-ups on the car in between the three races and we made progress with each one. By the end of meeting, I had a car that I could really push with, and that’s a strong sign for the future.
“We have banked points this weekend when we were on the back foot, so that is another positive to take away and we have less success ballast when the championship reconvenes at Oulton Park in five weeks’ time too. We can make more progress between now and then, so we are still upbeat.”
Meanwhile, Sam Tordoff endured his first tricky weekend in the series, but kept a calm head to claim fourth, seventh and eighth place finishes in the day’s three respective races.
Like his teammate, Tordoff was pleased to have got through the weekend and was focused on securing stronger results in the upcoming races.
“It was clear that we didn’t have the quickest car at Thruxton so the objective then is to try and chip away at it and get as fast as possible while keeping things sensible.
“We’ve got Thruxton behind us now and we don’t have to go back there, so we can concentrate on tracks where we know we will be stronger.”